Finally home. What a night! I could do that again many times (the only more exciting time on console was watching Phoenix land on Mars). It was 5 years ago today I was in Cocoa Beach watching fireworks, prepping for Juno propellant load that week (seems like more than 5 years though). Not able to sleep yet but sitting back drinking a Belgium Tripel I bought in Brugge last year, watching my DVR of today's the Tour de France stage (I love to bike). Jupiter is so bright in the West sky at sunset right now, and now each night I and everyone on Juno can look up and know that we have something at that bright point of light. With Mars also bright to the South at sunset of makes a nice pair of spots in the sky. I worked Cassini many years ago (1st interplanetary mission) and cool to know I worked 2 of the 3 outer planet orbit insertions. How long the 7 year Cassini cruise seemed at launch and now it has been at Saturn for 12 years (I am starting to feel old).

Kudos to Mike Caplinger and all of MSS for that approach movie. It was much more awe inspiring that I had imagined. Really made me feel like we were looking out the (albeit spinning) port hole as we came into port Jupiter. The entire ops teams stopped to watch it when it was played in the press conference. Got to get to sleep now since we get playback data tomorrow. Go Juno!

Great to see Aussie news highlighting the Juno mission.I guess a minor nitpick, they are saying, Juno has entered Jupiter'sorbit. Should be, has entered orbit around Jupiter. No prob, mostpeople you speak to are very impressed.

Kudos to Mike Caplinger and all of MSS for that approach movie. It was much more awe inspiring that I had imagined. Really made me feel like we were looking out the (albeit spinning) port hole as we came into port Jupiter. The entire ops teams stopped to watch it when it was played in the press conference. Got to get to sleep now since we get playback data tomorrow. Go Juno!

Thank you. There hasn't been much discussion of how the movie was made. We took highly compressed RGB images once every 15 minutes for 17 days (every 30 minutes on day 1), from 12 June to 29 June, with a few multihour gaps. The decompressed and dark-subtracted images were processed through a pipeline I wrote in Python using the OpenCV toolkit, which finds the planet in each color band, subpixel registers the colors to each other, rotates the image to north up, attempts to mask out the planet and then stretches the background harder so that the moons are visible, and then composites everything together. (No spacecraft attitude telemetry was used because we weren't sure when the C kernels would be available.) Images where the planet was split across filter boundaries had to be fixed manually using a GUI I hacked together. Those frames were then handed off to my colleague Mike Ravine, who laboriously fixed all of the remaining stray light, noise pixels, color misregistration, etc by hand. Those were handed off to JPL for production.

Sorry about the lack of release of the raw data. That decision was made above the pay grade of anybody at MSSS.

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Disclaimer: This post is based on public information only. Any opinions are my own.

I believe that C kernel production is on a weekly cadence; the most recent, http://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/naif/JUNO/ker...9_160625_v01.bc was posted on 29 June and I expect the next set to come out tomorrow. This would have been too late for our processing, so it was the right call. Of course it's not clear that using C kernel information would have been better. Instead we just used OpenCV "blob detection".

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Disclaimer: This post is based on public information only. Any opinions are my own.

Note that two flavors of our processed approach movie images are at https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/processing -- I think what they're calling "level 1" is color-registered but unstretched, and what they're calling "level 2" is rotated, stretched and hand-processed to remove noise and other artifacts from the automatic processing.

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Disclaimer: This post is based on public information only. Any opinions are my own.

[Moderator note: Removed the Flickr images that got loaded here and left the links only. Reason: The images are very big and therefore it took a lot of time to load this thread and some browsers also don't handle this well]

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